There is a curious detail about the small Karoo town of Aliwal North: the dorp remains dead-still while the sun and stars revolve around it.
This is how it came about: in 1872, a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church told his shocked congregation that the earth rotated round the sun.
Maybe he’d sneaked a look at a book on Galileo. A Mr JW Sauer got up in the middle of the service, objecting to this rubbish, and walked out – followed by most of the congregation.
An urgent meeting of the church council produced a resolution they figured would win back the congregation (whether they believed it is not recorded): ‘As from today, the earth round Aliwal North no longer rotates.’ The order has never been rescinded and, apparently, is still valid.
I discovered this on a visit to the local museum. All over South Africa, fascinating facts and objects are assembled from a single desire – to preserve the memory of our passing.
Mostly, they are kept in little country museums, lovingly put together by people with a sense of the swift passage of time and the brief period given us to experience it.
Recorded in Oudtshoorn’s museum is the exact weight that will break an ostrich egg placed small end upwards. In Villiersdorp, you can find out about Mr and Mrs DJ le Roux who, in the 1930s, walked almost clear around the world pushing a wheelbarrow.
In Nieuwoudtville a century ago, the community was shocked when the treasurer of the money collected to build a Dutch Reformed church died without telling anyone where he’d stashed their 8 000. When someone spotted him several years later in South West Africa, they dug up his coffin and found it contained a dead pig. Oh, and the local garage, Protea Motors, has possibly the country’s finest collection of motorbikes, including an extremely rare Panther, beautifully reconstructed from rusty remains.
In Port Nolloth is a photograph of the railway line between the port and Okiep built in the late 19th century to carry copper to the coast. The photo shows the carriages were not pulled by an engine, but by mules. On display in the Springbok museum is a wind-up gramophone with a 72 rpm recording of Bing Crosby singing ‘Hawaiian Paradise’.
There’s a rusty Royal typewriter with the label ‘ Tik Masjien’ and a bottle of dried-up Tippex, which reminded me about how far the technology of my profession has come in very few years.
We are, you see, painfully transient creatures – more so than we imagine. Think back to something that happened in your childhood, something you can still visualise, feel or even smell. You were there at the time, yes? How else could you remember it? Now here’s the bombshell: you weren’t there at all. Not a single atom in your body today was there. All have been replaced.
Whatever you may be, you are not the stuff of what you are made. Matter flows from place to place and only memory holds. Vast repositories like national libraries, Google and Wikipedia may hold the memories of nations, whole peoples and rafts of time, but little country museums capture the recollections of ordinary folk – and make us smile at our own oddity. In that way, they humble and humanise us.
Southern Africa is full of them and I never fail to take time off for a visit. It’s always worth the wistful hour. And don’t forget, September 24 is Heritage Day. You could start on page 76 with a tour of Cape Town’s old forts.
